Panda to your Every Desire (11 page)

Next to it was a poster of a cheery Glesga wifie carrying a shopping basket with the caption: “I got it at the Co-op.”

A MOTHER was seen arguing with her young daughter on Glasgow’s Byres Road when she suddenly snapped at the girl: “I should have called you Google – you’ve got an answer for everything.”

A PARTICK reader was amongst the large crowd on Dumbarton Road held back because of the police siege on the flat where a chap had barricaded himself in.

She tells us: “Two old dears pushed to the front and asked what was going on. ‘The polis are watching that,’ a chap replied. ‘The guy’s keepin’ a hostage up there.’

“‘Hear that, Mary?’ said the woman to her pal. ‘The police are here with their guns ‘cause somebody’s keeping horses in his flat.”’

Travel may or may not broaden the mind, but it can give you a laugh.

AN ENGLISH chap working in Glasgow was telling his colleagues in the pub: “I got a train to Airdrie the other night. The ticket chap said it would be 19:45 when we arrived.

“He was being a bit harsh – it looked more like the early sixties to me.”

MHAIRI PEARSON was on the 44 bus in Glasgow when she heard a teenage girl tell her mum: “I wish I had bigger boobs.” Her mother gave the advice: “Eat doughnuts. It worked for me.”

A DRIVING test examiner swears he asked a woman learner to reverse around a corner. Unfortunately, the car came to a halt at least three feet from the pavement.

“Could you get a little closer?” he asked her.

She unbuckled her seatbelt, slid over towards him, and asked: “Now what?”

MATT DUFFY tells us that when he was driving a cab at Anniesland in Glasgow, a little old lady passenger accused taxi drivers of sticking their bottles of Irn-Bru beside the meter as the iron in the drink made the meters go round faster.

“Youse are aw robbers, so ye ur,” she added.

A PSYCHIATRIST tells us: “Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, then acceptance.”

She added: “The five stages to buying petrol.”

A READER recalls the late great polymath and football pundit Bob Crampsey who explained at a dinner that on the way, his taxi driver asked: “Are you thon Bob Crampsey that won the Brain of Britain on the radio?”

On proudly confirming that he was indeed, he was somewhat deflated with the reply: “Do you no’ get hacked off being mistaken for that clown that does the fitba?”

EDINBURGH tram boss David Mackay resigned, describing the project as “hell on wheels”. A reader says: “If he thinks that’s hell on wheels, then he’s obviously never been on a Glasgow late-night bus on a Friday.”

A READER overhears an old chauvinist at his golf club pontificate: “Did you see that bad drivers are to be hit with £100 fixed penalty fines?

“No doubt the feminists will soon be telling us it’s a sexist law.”

GLASGOW’S Queen Street Station is of course a terminus. That would seem obvious from the row of buffers facing the trains. Nevertheless, Dave Martin in Dundee tells us he was catching the Glasgow to Dundee train at Queen Street when a group of American tourists came on.

One of them asked the Scottish chap across the table from him if he knew if his seat was forward facing.

“I hope not,” replied the Scot. “Otherwise we’d be heading for George Square.”

A FRUSTRATED Dunblane reader who spends much of his time travelling on business asks: “Did you know that the smallest unit of speed is the Stobart?”

He explains: “It is the difference in speed between a lorry overtaking on a dual carriageway, and the speed of the lorry it is overtaking.”

A CHAP in the pub at the weekend, where the discussion was on the rising cost of living, declared: “I was at the garage where the petrol came to £39.99, so I give the pump a little squeeze to round it up.

“Went in to pay and the cashier said, ‘That’ll be £44.78.”’

MOTORWAY signs continued. Says John Cochrane, “The overheard sign said: ‘Breakdown Junction 22’. When I got there I just burst into tears.”

THE PRICE of fuel continues to vex folk it seems. A reader in a West Lothian village spotted a van parked in the street with a sign propped on the dashboard stating: “No petrol kept in this van overnight.”

A READER on the 9 bus in Glasgow heard an old dear tell her friend that the husband of a mutual friend had just died.

“Was it cancer?” the pal asked.

“No, nothing that serious,” replied the pensioner.

“WHEN I bought my car,” said the chap in the pub at the weekend, “the salesmen said it would last a lifetime.”

He added: “I didn’t realise he was referring to the payments.”

MUNGO HENNING in Ayrshire thought the tyres on his wife’s car looked a bit soft so drove it to the garage to check. When he asked the attendant for a 20p piece for the air compressor he was told it now took a 50p piece. When he queried such a large increase in price, the chap told him: “That’s inflation for you.”

BUS drivers have to ask the destination from holders of free bus passes, which can cause confusion.

Charles Fletcher tells us of a wee wummin on a Glasgow bus sitting down next to a friend of his and declaring: “What a lovely man yon driver is.

“He asked me where I was going and I said I was off to meet my pal for a coffee. Isn’t he kind to care?”

A FORMER driving test examiner tells us about a middle-aged driver in Ayrshire sitting her test who found the road blocked by a van of workies half-heartedly unloading scaffolding. She asked the examiner what to do, and he replied, as he had to: “Do what you would normally do in such circumstances.”

She then surprised him by getting out of the car and shouting at the workmen: “Wid youse idle b******* shift that truck tae ah get past, yer haudin’ up ma drivin’ test.”

The truck was immediately shifted, but the lady failed her test.

WE ASKED for your driving test tales and Jim Scott recalls: “When I sat my first test in Shettleston, the examiner says, ‘ Take the next on the right,’ which I did, which turned out to be the car park of a social club, so he says, ‘I told you take the next street on the right!’ and I argued that he didn’t. I think I compounded it by asking, ‘Since we are here do you fancy a pint?’ Stony silence, and then he failed me.

“Next time I sat it in Carntyne to avoid him, and passed, even though it was ten to four and the weans from Smythcroft school were trying to impale themselves on my car.”

A LANARK reader driving his family to visit relatives in Devon couldn’t believe it when one of his youngsters asked soon into the journey the inevitable: “Are we nearly there yet?” He tried to nip this line of questioning in the bud by telling his kids that they wouldn’t reach their destination until after it was dark.

His hopes of a question-free journey were dashed when his youngster asked shortly afterwards: “Is it nearly dark yet?”

MANY fathers will sympathise with Glasgow stand-up Raymond Mearns who explained that his teenage daughter thought Raymond drove a “magic taxi”.

“Not only,” said Raymond, “did she expect it to take her from the house to anywhere she wanted to go to in Glasgow, but at the end of the journey I had to hand her a tenner instead of the other way round.”

AFTER our tale of driving instructions, Jim Cunningham tells us of a pal who had started taking driving lessons, and who was sitting behind his mum and dad in the family car, with his dad driving.

“As he was now the ‘expert’ on driving,” says Jim, “he spent the journey constantly giving his father advice from the back seat on how his father should be negotiating the route.

“Eventually his father turned to the rear of the car and asked him, ‘Look, who’s driving this car? You or your mother?”’

AUTHOR Daniel Gray was travelling to Ayr for a Partick Thistle match when he got stuck at the Central Station ticket machine behind an older couple struggling to work it.

The young chap behind him rather unfairly said: “This is exactly why old people shouldn’t be allowed to use technology. They two are like my maw pointing the TV remote at the kettle.”

OUR TALES of buses remind a south-side reader of catching his regular No. 4 bus from Buchanan Street that goes past his road end before travelling on to Kilmarnock. One night he fell asleep and woke up in Kilmarnock, nearly thirty miles further than he wanted to go.

Seeing that the driver was a regular on the route, he said to him: “You know where I normally get off. Why didn’t you wake me?”

“You looked so peaceful I didn’t have the heart to,” the driver replied.

THE SNOW causing travel disruption reminded Douglas Kinnaird of being at Maxwell Park Station in Glasgow on a previous inclement day when the train arrived. As the doors opened, a business chap imperiously told the ticket collector: “Perhaps you should only run trains when it snows. This is the first time this week the 8.47 has been on time.”

“It’s the 8.17,” replied the ticket chap.

AH THE irony of the film organisation Bafta cancelling its showing in Glasgow of the latest Coen Brothers film because of the inclement weather. Name of the film?
True Grit
.

CLEARLY a fan of the west of Scotland vernacular, Stewart MacKenzie asks: “Can they not make up their minds? Signs are appearing all over the place: ‘Road Closed – Snow’. Well which is it?”

A READER hears a young woman on the bus into Glasgow tell her pal that she had bought her boyfriend a special presentation box of Jack Daniel’s whiskey with an engraved crystal glass for Christmas. She then added: “I told my mum I had got him a Jack Daniel’s presentation box. She told me she thought he was too old for a magic set.”

THE BAD weather meant people turning to alternative transport, and one Glasgow traveller, new to First buses, asked the Polish driver for a “Noddy ticket”. He stared at her blankly. So she insisted: “I was told to ask for a Noddy ticket.” Still no response.

At that, the chap behind her spoke up: “She wants an all day ticket.”

“I TOOK the advice,” said the chap in the pub, “not to travel in bad weather without a shovel, flask, wellies and a blanket.”

“Mind you,” he added, “I got a lot of funny looks on the bus.”

A MOTHERWELL reader was impressed that a young neighbour was out washing her small Fiat car at the weekend, despite it being a cold, grey day.

After covering the car in warm soapy water, the girl extemporised by using a watering can from the garage to wash the soap off.

At that, a passing van driver wound down his window and shouted at her: “You’re wasting your time – these things never grow.”

GLASGOW buses continued. Rod Macfarlane recalls in his young days being a conductor on the 64 bus to Yoker when a chap came on, his eye ballooned up to the size of a melon, clutching an iron in his hand.

Says Rod: “He just stood there, then proceeded to shout out to the whole bus, ‘Does anywan want tae buy an iron?’

“I asked him why he was wanting to sell it and he replied, ‘Because she hit me wi’ it once and she is no gonnae do it again.”’

A READER heard a motorist in his local garage mutter about £1.30 for a litre of petrol being highway robbery – then watched him pay £1.60 for a half-litre bottle of water.

LIZANNE MacKENZIE in Dumfries was visiting Glasgow when she told her taxi driver that there seemed to be an awful lot of potholes in the streets.

“Some o’ thae potholes are that big,” her driver replied, “I saw two Chilean miners coming out o’ one o’ them.”